Make IT Real!, Sander R.B.E. Beals [uplifting novels .TXT] 📗

Armed with the pattern, I head on over to the fabric weaver. This marvelous piece of nano-production machinery can take a pattern like the one from the scanner, and make it into a perfect copy. The only drawback is that the pattern repeats with the size of the scan, but detecting that is made extra difficult by first of all using a hexagonal pattern surface, and secondly softening the edges to lessen any transitions that might occur in between the patterns.

Having uncovered the seat, I figure I'm going to need about a square meter of the fabric. I set the machine to produce it for me, and then head back into the kitchen because perfection takes patience (not time).

Since my love is apparently sleeping in today, I gather the belongings for my breakfast myself: Fruit salad today, for I feel in a light mood. Peaches, bananas and pineapple, all cut by hand, and sprinkled with sirup. With my bowl of fruit I head to the living room, to pass the time towards completion of the fabric with a good book.....

'a New Friend...'

Mayra takes us to one of the workshops on the first floor, while Sinan and Kayim go to pick up an extra floater for our trip that is to start tomorrow. Meanwhile, she will be helping us to fabricate our swimming attire for this afternoon. My two girls totally dig the approach to designing the swim wear: they step onto the scanner pad fully clothed, so the system can take their measurements to produce a scale model of them. Mayra hands them their models, and tells them to paint on their desired 'cover'. After they've finished, Mayra sets up the first of the two scale models for production. We see a full scale model of Valerie appear on the pad, clothed exactly as my daughter painted the bathing suit just minutes earlier. Mayra invites Valerie to select a material for her outfit, and the system alters the mannequin accordingly. Once we are done, the mannequin dissolves and the bathing suit drops onto the scanner pad. Jane's suit is next, and materializes in much the same fashion. Since they seem to have so much fun using the system, Gina and I allow them to design our bathing suits as well.

Just as we finish producing our swimsuits, Sinan and Kayim enter again. They have our transport for tomorrow parked downstairs. After lunch we all climb in, to have it take us to the swimming pool. No hassle with tickets, because the swimming pool (like everything else here) is free. We get shown to our dressing rooms, and change into our newly acquired bathing suits. I feel slightly odd, because the girls went all out when they designed my swimming gear: I look like something that dropped in straight from a Marvel comic, but without the superpowers.

We enter the large dome, where the swimming pools are located. It is crowded, but surprisingly tranquil. It seems the Inner Earth people make far less noise when swimming. Valerie and Jane go off into the pool, being their normal, noisy selves. I expect them to attract lots of attention, but strangely enough, nobody seems to really care about their ecstatic cries. They are spotted by one other person however: a girl, around nineteen years of age, quickly befriends them. From the looks I'd say she wasn't one of the Inner Earth people, and I turn out to be right: as we get together later, the girl introduces herself as Kim, and when I ask her if she's from the outside, she tells us her story.

She apparently came here through the same elevator as we did, having visited the big pyramid with her husband in nineteen-hundred and twenty-nine. After they became separated, and she discovered the way down, she'd decided to stay below, wanting to escape her marriage and the empty society life she was trapped in. Actually, she'd been around thirty when she came here, and some quick calculating on my part reveals her true age as being one hundred and eight. I can't help but be amazed: over a hundred years old, but looking like nineteen. Kim, being a 'normal' human, has obviously acquired the same agelessness as the Inner Earth people. For a moment there, I consider also staying below, but then I can not possibly deny the girls' mother the pleasure of seeing her girls grow up. So I guess I'll have to return sometime. Luckily for us, we are on a four week vacation, and I've told Joyce we will contact her when we get back. That seems a bit weird, but she herself is on holiday with her new flame, somewhere in the Caribbean, totally away from civilization.

When the young girls go back to the swimming pool, Gina and I decide to try the weird water for ourselves. I first try floating on my back, which is a weird sensation indeed: my body is only halfway in the water, even when I fully exhale to reduce my buoyancy. Trying to dive in is somewhat of a no-no: you are immediately pushed back to the surface, so it is hardly possible to hit your head in shallow water. Once I narrowly escaped breaking my neck that way, but at least here it won't happen. Now that we're used to the remarkable water, we turn our attention to the kids. There, we find that they've split up: Jane is chasing after Kim, while Valerie and Kayim are in the opposite end of the pool, deeply engaged in talking. We attach ourselves to the group that's obviously engaged in playing tag, and I'm immediately caught. I spend about half an hour chasing Jane, Kim and Gina through the bath, but my lousy condition catches up with me here: Even though I feel exceptionally great today, I can't succeed in catching any of them. Finally, Jane 'fails' to avoid me, and I can go to the edge of the bath, to rest and recover.

After a while, Kim joins me on the bench. She tells me, that Kayim has invited her to come along on the trip around Inner Earth. I agree to Kayim's invitation, because it will be nice to have somebody there who's been through the experience of adapting to life here in Inner Earth. We chat along, only to be interrupted by Jane, who takes another snapshot of the two of us, and then goes off to find Valerie and Kayim. Out loud I wonder about the state of the camera's batteries, because she's been taking a lot of pictures. Kim reassures me: “batteries last much longer down here, because there are far less devices that draw energy from them. She mentions the cell phone towers, and radio towers not as sources of information, but as sinks for energy, that also affect humans. I look surprised, because how in Earth can Kim possibly know about cell phone towers, when she's come down here around 1930? She appears to have read my mind, and quickly explains that she is part of the task force that keeps abreast of surface developments, to determine when (if ever) it will be safe to hook up with the surface population. “Will that ever happen?”, I ask rather skeptical. Kim sees things far more sunny: “Consciousness up there is now rapidly evolving, mainly thanks to the Web. I can't be quite sure, but my guess is that it's going to happen around 2012”.

Thinking back to her remark about the cell phone towers, I suddenly figure out why I was so well rested this morning. It wasn't just a good night's sleep, but also the absence of these energy-draining devices that made me feel like a million. “Besides, if the batteries really do run out, Kayim can probably materialize you a replacement that lasts for years”, Kim concludes with a smile.

At the end of the afternoon, the girls seem exhausted. Eight in number now, we walk outside to the floater. As there are only seven seats, Jane will ride it standing and photographing back to the 'mansion'. It only takes a few minutes, before the well-rounded structure appears before us. We get out, and ride the disc to the top floor. Kayim gathers us around the large table, while his mother and father retreat into the kitchen area to prepare dinner. Like always, it will be entirely vegetarian, but nevertheless I will enjoy it immensely. On the large table, Kayim has materialized a section of the Inner Earth that we will be visiting tomorrow. It is Shamballah the Lesser, the capital of Inner Earth. I already heard a little about it from the Elders this morning, about the giants that dwell there. I think I will have to get used to them: Finally some people that I can literally look up to: back home, my one hundred and ninety-seven centimeters and my lack of temper got me the nickname 'the Big Friendly Giant', but out there I will definitely have to look up to possibly even Bigger, Friendlier Giants...

Kayim agrees with me: the people there are very friendly, and we will have no problem at all to find accommodations there. In fact, they seem to exist merely for the purpose of helping others, an outlook in life that not everybody on the surface of the planet shares. While Kayim is telling my ladies about the coming visit, Kim attracts my attention. She wants to tell me about Valerie and Kayim. I did notice a rather unusual attraction between the two, but thought nothing of it. I know Valerie to be a level-headed lady, who can take care of herself. I gently break the news to Kim, but she responds in a remarkable way: “I wish I'd had a dad like you!” As we break off our dialog, the others move away from the table, towards the elevator disc. Apparently, they have something planned. When I ask Valerie, she replies that we will go for a walk, and invites me and Kim along.

4444AD, Day 225, 09:08, Workshop

As I walk back into the workshop, the soothing voice of the fabric weaver notifies me of its completion of the job. One square meter of the simulated creamy leather is lying on my work area, in front of the machine. Today I work on my own gems, but jobs for others happen just as often. And unlike my 2007 counterpart, I never worry about what I'll get back for it. Once you are convinced that everything will be taken care of, trivialities like that are no longer worth worrying about.

I finish taking apart the original leather seating, and meticulously unfasten the stitches that held it together all these years. I spread the old pieces of leather onto the new fabric, and find my square meter estimate to be totally on the mark: several centimeters separate the various parts, so the automated cutter will have no problem finding the outlines.

I switch it on, and the directed low-intensity laser beam scans past the surface. It's sensors pick up the height difference between the new material and the old parts on top of it, and quickly settles into their perceived outline proposition. I inspect, and correct a few minor misreads, by simply touching the outlines and redrawing parts of them with my finger. When it's perfect, I take off the old parts, and let the high-powered cutting beam take over: presto, four new pieces of 'leather', ready to be sown. The cutting laser even punctured the holes that the needle left in the original material.

Like the tailors from days of old, I sit on the table with my legs crossed, to sow the parts together. I remember having struggled with the orientation of stuff like that when doing similar work in my distant past, but not anymore: now, I pick up the pieces one by one, and calmly stitch them together with a needle. There's no technical substitute for needlework, at least not if you want